Introduction to the 2025 Edition
1984 gets all the ink, but it was the year 1985 that changed me forever. There was no keeping me down on the farm after I’d seen Paree (and Istanbul, Leningrad, Dublin and a beer garden in Salzburg).
There have been 46 follow-up journeys since then, and I’ve always returned to the place where I grew up, which I consider home, but in 1985 the European continent irrevocably rewired my consciousness. I’ve been unfathomably fortunate. I’ve also worked exceedingly hard to sustain my wanderlust.
We live in tumultuous times, and in May of 2025, as I set out to chronicle these long-lost experiences, I’m not laboring under any illusions (delusions?) whatever about a pressing need for autobiographical renderings documenting a generally privileged white American ne’er-do-well’s European vacation 40 years ago.
Rather, I’m writing for me, precisely because it’s a form of escape from the prevailing tumult.
Naturally, I hope you enjoy it. I’m not offended it you don’t. Frequent readers (thank you, by the way) will note that today’s first installment borrows heavily from previous writing, and to a lesser extent the second.
But after that, the bulk of this narrative has not been offered for public viewing since 2015 at my former blog. Perhaps this will be the definitive version, with the aim of publishing on Thursdays through August, 2025.
I always knew something about me was different; not better or worse, just different. The stereotypical “American Dream” never enticed me, and there’s little more to add to this sentence: “An atheistic, socialistic polemicist and contrarian living in Southern Indiana, where he detests Bud Light.”
My eccentricities were obvious to me long before Europe entered the scene. While elements of the attraction remain mysterious even today, I know that whatever the nature of the existential itch afflicting me, Europe enabled it to be scratched.
I should say “enables” in the present tense, because the bug still bites. Long may this scratching continue. After the fire, the fire still burns.
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Part 1: Three months that shook my world.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
―Mark Twain, from Innocents Abroad
Seriously, shouldn’t we retire during the front part of our lives, while we’re young and possess the verve and stamina to enjoy it, rather than collapse into retirement on the back side, when a steadily encroaching decrepitude of body and spirit inevitably corrodes the prospects for pleasure?
Hence the yarns I frequently spin about my foreign journeys during the 1980s, into the early 1990s. During an eight-year period (1985-1992), I spent just shy of two (cumulative) years traveling in Europe, forever referring to it as the period of my “early retirement.”
This isn’t exactly true, of course, because six working years were necessary to be gone for 24 leisurely months. Let’s not be deterred by minor, pesky details. If there has been any consistent theme throughout my life, it is this: I’m a slow learner and a late bloomer. Apart from teaching myself to read at an early age, nothing about me ever could be characterized by the word “precocious.”
Travel was the spark. It caused that metaphorical light bulb above my head to finally glow, and these opening excursions during the 1980s were transformative. My physical location at home in Southern Indiana began to matter far less than a brain newly freed to range across the planet.
In 1989, when I first began working somewhat tentatively at Sportstime Pizza — eventually to be spun off into Rich O’s Public House (1992) and later the New Albanian Brewing Company — all my interests merged into one.
My “early” retirement ended, and the approximation of a career began. By grudging necessity, travel for me became more frequent at the cost of relinquishing those months-long getaways. But in the end, they all add up to one unceasing epiphany.
As of the time of writing in May of 2025, I’ve successfully completed 47 overseas seminars, including the first one 40 years ago. To my mind, each of them has been tantamount to course credits toward continuing studies in life experience. Taken together, these surely merit a phantom master’s degree, and a university somewhere should damn well award me an honorary one.
I’m often asked if the travel bug was about sating a seemingly unquenchable thirst for beer. It wasn’t, at least in the beginning. What excited me the most at the outset of my European travel career 40 years ago was history, geography, literature, music and art, as components of what we call the Western canon.
The Western canon is the body of books, music, and art that scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. It includes works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, music, art, sculpture, and architecture generally perceived as being of major artistic merit and representing the high culture of Europe and North America. Philosopher John Searle suggests that the Western canon can be roughly defined as “a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature”.
Delayed onset adulthood kicked in for me when I finally accepted that incessantly craving ever greater exposure to this body of knowledge (and others) wasn’t a bad thing for a hick from somewhere near French Lick. In fact it was a very good thing, and the pursuit of culture made me happy in and of itself.
I’m not bright enough to be an intellectual, but it’s important to have goals in life, and I can pretend with the best of them.
Absent religion, Europe provided something tangible for me to believe in. Later, beer eased into a sort of co-billing. However, so as to contextualize my earliest European adventures as components of what was to become a career in beer, they helped to provide a few answers to the biggest existential question of all.
If American beer and brewing came to the USA from Europe, how had it remained so vibrant in Europe, meanwhile devolving to Liteweight carbonated urine back home?
It is clear to me now that mass-market, industrial-scale beer “revolutionized” the post-Prohibition marketplace in the USA by rendering beer into a flavorless commodity like white bread, necessitating a counter-revolution, which by 1985 had been underway since 1976 and the advent of New Albion Brewing Company in California.
Except that in 1985, metropolitan Louisville had yet to see (or taste) very much of what was referred to as microbrewing, and then “craft” beer. Europe remained the place to go if one wished to experience the best that beer could be, and so I went, even though I knew almost nothing about beer and brewing apart from yearning for something better.
In all probability, that’s what made learning about Europe and its beer so much fun, but what comes as a huge surprise to many is how little beer I drank during the first visit. There’ll be more about that next time.
—
“The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos. Algos means ‘suffering.’ So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance
On the morning of May 14, 1985, a middle-class American youth from bucolic Floyd County, Indiana, stumbled greasy and sleepless into the arrivals hall of a foreign airport. Following the requisite passport, customs formalities and currency exchange, he endured a thoroughly confusing and memorable first day in Europe.
40 years have passed since that bewildering and exhilarating Luxembourg inaugural, and the nostalgia is palpable, along with a sense of pride. My inaugural European sojourn was conceived and executed with a single-minded determination unknown to me at the time. I was as flabbergasted as anyone that it actually worked out.
In truth, even the most minor of ephemeral insights would have seemed disproportionately huge given my youthful indecisiveness and lack of focus. A university degree in philosophy made for witty repartee, but little else, and it seemed to me that career choices were for fools who never saw the sun rise after an evening spent closing every bar in town.
The rural ideal of my upbringing, with ten placid green acres with a split-level dream home, a riding lawnmower, budding little leaguers and a fridge filled with Old Milwaukee Light? That was philistinism ― although if so, what was the alternative?
At the age of 24, two part-time jobs were sufficient to pay my bills. They also provided a semblance of scheduling flexibility in the event of hangovers. Somehow there always was enough beer money. Why else would a person work at a package store in the first place?
But in truth, I wasn’t going anywhere. Even worse, I knew it.
In 1983, I was asked by the late Bob Youngblood, my former high school English teacher, to accompany him as a second chaperone on a student trip to Europe the following year. The price seemed reasonable at $1,600 for nine days, with airfare, hotels, bus and most meals included. I responded affirmatively.
A few months later, I was strolling past the travel section in the library when a title caught my eye: Europe on $25 a Day, by Arthur Frommer.
I shook my head with disbelief. Was it a misprint? Could it really be true? Skeptical, I checked out the book, took it home, poured a beer, and started reading it cover to cover. The earth moved under my feet. With clear and reasonable tips, I was instructed how to do Europe the right way, and for a far longer duration than nine days.
My new writing hero (he died in 2024 at 95 years of age) insisted that travel could be educational, offering rare glimpses into different worlds. His advice on the nuts and bolts of budget travel technique was relentlessly informative, effortlessly evocative and consistently pragmatic.
- Always think like a European traveler, not an American, and like a local, not a visitor.
- Don’t expect things in a foreign country to be the same as home, and expect to pay more when they are.
- Think, plan, and accept the available bargains.
- Don’t eat every meal in a restaurant. Pack a salami, buy a loaf of cheap crusty bread, and picnic.
- Walk, ride the bus, rent a bike.
My brain may have been hard-wired for the humanities and history, and yet even I could do this kind of math: at $25 per day, my $1,600 properly budgeted the Frommer way came out to 36 days, not nine. If I were to postpone the epic voyage for another year, leaving even more time to save money, the trip might last two or three months, not nine days.
For the next year and a half, a European travel obsession seized my brain and escalated, fed by a steady diet of travel books, magazine articles at the library and PBS documentaries.
Thomas Cook rail schedules were studied, and European history devoured with renewed zeal. Plans were jotted, expanded, revised, discarded, and brought back from the waste paper basket. I acquired a Pentax K-1000 camera and learned how to use it, just barely in time.
By the spring of 1985, with departure nearing, a rough outline had settled into place.
There would be a round-trip flight on the then-cheapest carrier Icelandair from Chicago, returning 88 days after departure. Ground transport would be a three-month Eurailpass (1st class, not 2nd, to be explained later).
Convinced that it would be my sole trip to Europe, a kamikaze itinerary was planned, incorporating nights on trains sleeping in seats, and crashing on the decks of ferry boats. I studied every available trick to skim cash and expand the duration of my experience.
Then suddenly, the curtain finally rose. There was a sleepless night on an eastbound flight, and before I knew it, a disorienting airport in Luxembourg. Subsequently, theory yielded to practice. My well-ordered plan did not take into account greenness, timidity and stubbornness.
In short, the real work was just beginning. A profusion of languages, local customs and currencies washed over me. ATMs barely existed, and the failure to note esoteric regional holidays and erratic hours kept by mom and pop shops led to foodless nights. There were missed connections, panicked fumbling and myriad minor disappointments.
There were periods of near panic, and yet I managed to keep moving. Despite the red-faced embarrassments, cheap hostels already booked solid, standing-room-only overnight train trips, fear of squat-only “toilets” in Turkey, forgetting to pack a towel and using my only long-sleeved shirt to dry off, in the end it all worked out.
Halfway through the trip, I became transformed into a grizzled elder, dispensing sage advice to the kids and newbies. 88 days later, back again in Luxembourg for the westbound flight home, I could think of only one topic.
When’s the sequel, and can it please be soon?
The Hoosier pundit John Mellencamp once observed, “When I think about those days, all I can do is sit and smile,” and smiles quickly turn to wistful laughter, especially when I consider how effectively my 80s-era “retirement” plan was implemented, seeing as now, from the vantage point of 2025, work turns out to be the curse of anyone like me who also precluded retirement savings by traveling.
But I wouldn’t change a single thing.
Next: A baseball game in Chicago, and what I learned in Luxembourg.
